London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Home Secretary Theresa May warned today that tens of thousands of foreign students were failing to return to their home country after their courses, as she rebuffed calls for them to be exempted from the Government’s immigration cap.

Lady Antonia Fraser has a new man in her life. On Radio 4’s Start the Week yesterday, presenter Anne McElvoy suggested to her that she seemed to have “a bit of a crush” on Earl Grey, prime minister at the time of the great Reform Bill and hero of her book Perilous Question. “I believe your friends have suggested an alternative title for the book,” added McElvoy.

The internet, as Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, likes to remind us, is the world’s largest ungoverned space. It re-allocates power from states and from institutions. It is not only outside national boundaries, it floats above the earth itself. In his book The New Digital Age, Schmidt co-writes in wonder: “In the next decade the world’s virtual population will outnumber the population of earth.”